Why Monty wasn’t crazy for Kray

To millions who never met Charlie, he was the murderous Kray
twins' older brother, and every bit as wicked as them. As he'd explain to
anyone willing to listen, this was the cross he'd had to bear since their
convictions and imprisonment. Just how heavy that cross was didn't hit home to
me until one afternoon, in the summer of 1989, after I arrived at the DailyExpress for my afternoon shift. One of
my colleagues, a likeable, but strongly-opinionated Glaswegian named Bill Montgomery,
who knew I was ghosting Charlie's story, asked how it was going.

"Extremely well, thanks," I said. "We've just
done a few hours in the garden."

"In the garden?"

"Yeah. Charlie loves the sun. We always go in the
garden when we can."

"At your place?"

"Yeah."

"You allow that man in
your house?"

"Of course, I do," I said. "We're working
together."

"But he's one of the Krays, Robbie. They murdered
people, for God's sake."

"Charlie didn’t," I said, quietly.

"He may not have wielded the knife that killed McVitie,
but he got rid of his body."

"No, he didn't. Charlie had nothing to do with
McVitie's murder. He was fitted up."

"That's what he
says," Bill scoffed. How do you know he's telling the truth?"

"How can you be so sure he's not? You've never even met
the man."

"And I don't f----ing want to."

"Because he's a Kray?"

"Yeah," Bill said. "If you want to put it
that way. They're all f---ing gangsters."

"Charlie wasn't a gangster, Bill. The twins were the
gangsters."

"They're all the same, Robbie, Bill said. "All the
same."

I didn't want to waste time having a row with a man with a
closed mind, so I forced a smile. "Let's agree to disagree, Bill. Let's
leave it there."

And we did. We never spoke about Charlie – or his book –
again. But that conversation played on my mind and brought into focus the
enormity of Charlie's torment. If a seasoned sub-editor, responsible for
writing headlines and editing reporters' copy in a national newspaper, believed
he was every bit as nasty as the twins, what price the paper's millions of
readers? If a journalist with 40 years' experienced detested him so
vehemently, without having met him, what hope did that give Charlie?

Charlie's
autobiography, Me and My Brothers, is
published by Harper Perennial and available on Amazon. Order it HERE.